Pope's missionary prayer intention for May

The missionary prayer intention of Pope Francis for the month of May is that Mary’s intercession help Christians in secularized cultures be open to ‎proclaiming Jesus.  In one of his weekly audiences during the Year of Faith, the now retired Pope Benedict XVI had talked about ‎the danger of what he termed as “practical atheism.” People experience that kind of atheism when “the truths of faith or ‎religious rites are not denied but are merely deemed irrelevant to daily life, detached from life, pointless. ‎So it is that people often believe in God in a superficial manner, and live as though God did not exist.” ‎ Practical atheism fuels secularization. Wealth and pleasure are pursued instead of God.  According to Pope Francis such a secularism generates a selfish and utilitarian outlook of fellow humans leading to a “culture of waste” whose “victims are precisely the ‎weakest and most fragile human beings—the unborn, the poorest, the sick and elderly, the seriously ‎handicapped—who are in danger of being ‘thrown away,’ expelled from a system that must be efficient, useful and profitable ‎at all costs.  Pope Francis elaborated: “In fact, this false model of man and society implements a ‎practical atheism by rejecting the Word of God, which says: ‘Let us make man in our image, after our ‎likeness.’  The way to freedom from practical atheism and its “culture of waste is ‎through accepting the deep wisdom of Gods’ Word.” The Pope continued, “If we allow this Word to ‎call into question our ways of thinking and acting, our standards, our priorities and our choices, then ‎things can change.” The Blessed Virgin Mary is the one who was so fully open to God’s Word that he, ‎the Son of God, took flesh in her womb.  Let us join the Pope this month, in praying to the Virgin Mary that we may be open to this Word in such a way ‎that he may be born in anew in us and speak of faith and love through us to secularized souls.